Eno: a fascinating, unguarded portrait of Brian Eno that changes with each watch
Using new generative software, director Gary Hustwit explores Brian Eno‘s creative strategies using a jigsaw puzzle of interview sequences designed to screen in random order, an inspired approach that comes with its own limitations.
To tackle a tireless explorer of music as a system of rules and patterns, the American documentarian Gary Hustwit has found an appropriately complex strategy. Not for Brian Eno a by-the-book compilation of archive footage and talking heads (Eno got one of those in 2011, with the epic but conventional Brian Eno: The Man Who Fell to Earth 1971-1977). Instead, Eno is a fascinating honeycomb of interlocking sequences, each tackling a different facet of his artistic methods and philosophy or a moment from his career, and playing in a jumbled order, which can change from day to day or from screening to screening.
Common to many of these particles are warm, unguarded interviews with Eno at his home and studio in Norfolk, where he’s seen layering sounds at his computer and out admiring shrubs in his garden. Indeed, it seems that for him sound-making is a quasi-horticultural pursuit. His interest in generative music derives from his thrill in planting something and watching it grow; in seeing complexity arising out of simplicity. “I like things that don’t look like they’re changing,” he says.
Hustwit’s jigsaw-puzzle pieces include invigorating sequences about Eno’s notebooks, his breakfast habits (or denial of them) and his invention of the ‘oblique strategies’ cards with which he throws haphazard instructions into his artistic projects. Roxy Music, David Bowie and a mixing-desk session with U2 are in the blend too. It doesn’t really matter what order these come in: each of these collaborations are the molecular elements that form a larger pattern of creative endeavour.
From helvetica font (Helvetica, 2007) to the industrial designer Dieter Rams (Rams, 2018), Hustwit has shown a preoccupation with creative systems and processes. His fragmented scheme here brings to mind François Girard’s prismatic look at another mathematically minded artist, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) – though the short films are now randomised, like a playlist set to shuffle.
The attempt to create an aleatoric, generative cinema to match Eno’s methods – via bespoke software which Hustwit developed with creative technologist Brendan Dawes – is inspired. If there is a flaw in the conception, it’s in the stubborn limitations of the medium. Watching the sequences in different orders may get the neurons firing off in new directions and making serendipitous connections but the film itself doesn’t grow, can’t grow, in any organic way.
More controllably, the transitions between sequences are accompanied by rows of jumbled letters on screen and a digital scrambling sound: corny and very un-Eno signposts that the thing we’re watching is changing.
► Eno is in UK cinemas from 12 July. Eno, the official soundtrack for the documentary, is available now.